The Renegade

Published: Autumn 2016

As for life after death?
Many
believe, but no one really
knows.
All those who claim
they know equate belief
and knowledge for psychiatric,
not spiritual reasons.
They
find living with uncertainty
impossible.
Believers pray
in gratitude, but doubts persist
even with the most devout.
They want to take Christ’s words
as scrivened by his four
stenographers and say amen.
Death is the problem — the fact
of death.
Reactions range
from fear to love.
The fearful
die living.
Even when those
most loved are taken, lovers
discover that love buries death.
The dead survive as presences
in dreams or thoughts that mock
whatever passes for resting
in peace.
After thirty-three
years of breath and three days
of death, the Messiah rose
to resume living with those
He loved.
Compared with that,
who needs theology or ritual
for reassurance?
What else is faith
but trusting that loves once known
will be known forever?
What’s truer
for God or each of us
than unions resurrected as reunions?
There is no otherwise.

Sam Hazo '49, the author of numerous books of poetry, essays and fiction, taught at Duquesne University for more than four decades and was the founder and longtime director of the International Poetry Forum.